Intervention?

It's official--Point Pleasant has been cancelled. What was supposed to be the final episode was bumped to air the delayed premiere of Life on a Stick and American Idol show due to the mix-up with the Idol phone numbers. Hm...four camera sit-com set in a mall food court or a drama centered around a girl's struggle with being the daughter of the devil co-created by Buffy writer Marti Noxon? Doesn't seem like a difficult choice to me.

What can we do about FOX? It's so easy to curse their name or just say, "Well, that's FOX for you." But this has to stop.

It's so hard to know what to do with FOX. They do greenlight excellent shows. They are the network that brought us The Simpsons, The X-Files, Ally McBeal, and Arrested Development. What I've seen of House, 24, Malcolm in the Middle, King of the Hill, Futurama, and The Bernie Mac I've enjoyed. And you must give them some credit for actually deciding to air Firefly and Point Pleasant. The FOX network is no stranger to good TV.

But they also greenlight so many sit-coms and stupid reality stunts that I just have absolutely no desire to watch. Especially if you normalize for the fewer hours of network programing that FOX offers compared to ABC, NBC, and CBS, FOX seems to be more likely to give a show a chance to air.

This could be part of their problem. I'm guessing Point Pleasant was cancelled for poor ratings. It averaged a 4.09 rating in its 8-week run. It will be replaced on the schedule with the six unaired episodes of Tru Calling, which FOX had initially planned to run after they yanked North Shore in the post-The O.C. timeslot, but they thought they had a hit that meshed nicely with The O.C. in Point Pleasant. During it's 20 episode first season, Tru Calling averaged a 4.55 rating. As there are five remaining unaired episodes of Point Pleasant, maybe it will return to the slot after they run out of Tru Calling episodes, or as filler in, say, June 2006.

FOX has fallen victim to a classic blunder. They are always looking for the next Hot Hot Hot!!!! thing, at the cost of letting something grow and build into something great. If you replace a show with slightly below average ratings but with fans who actively like the show with a different show with slightly below average ratings perhaps with people who will watch it because they were already on your network and won't change the channel, there's no net gain in viewership, accept for a possible slight bump for to give it a try and not like it, at the cost of hurting more people than you will make happy with the show about the madcap adventures of perveyers of corn dogs. The last thing that happened on Point Pleasant was the evil guy killing of the guy that had been set up as a great asset to the main character as the price for not killing the surrogate sister who may or may not really believe in her. Why would I want this when I can have "Hey, let's deep fry everything in the boss's office supplies," which was funnier in the The Office with the stapler in the Jell-O mold mainly because things are always funnier when you have interesting characters. Well, no I think a Jell-Oed stapler is just funnier than and deep-fried desk lamp regardless of who the characters are.

FOX has this huge hit with American Idol. Yeah, I don't really get it myself, but I can't deny that it is a huge ratings success, drawing in lots of ad revenue and as a reality show, I'm assuming it has low production costs. Why not let some of this cash subsidize a TV show that is actually trying to tell a story that's a season long? Currently showing at MoMA is Contemporary Voices: Works from The UBS Art Collection. UBS is an investment bank and assest management firm, but yet they see it worthwhile to subsidize the arts. Why can't a ratings generation company like FOX do the same? Oh, that's right they are. Stacked with Pamela Anderson is coming soon to a television far away from me. At least I can take comfort in knowing that it won't last very long.

Inventory Control

While I was in DC, I had my first IKEA experience. Andy, Tanya, and I on Saturday night headed over to the College Park IKEA. After roaming around for a little while, I decided to get a chair. So I head out to the Self-Serve Furniture warehouse to pick up my chair. When I find the where the chairs are stored, there are none available on the ground level--I need the full service furniture. There are some up on the shelf ten feet above my head. So I go to the info tower and request some help. The guy tells me that they don't have any, but they will get a shipment tomorrow. But there are some on the shelf, I tell him. He checks the computer inventory and shows me that there are none available. Again, I tell him that I can see some on the higher shelf. Then he tells me that they can't get the forklifts out for safety reasons. I wonder if it is more than they they can't get the folklifts out because it's 15 minutes until they close, but I don't say anything about that.

It is interesting that their inventory did say they didn't have any available, and so I guess tomorrow's shipment will actually be coming from themselves?

The next morning, I did not go back to the College Park IKEA. I instead went to the Woodbridge IKEA on my way home. They had my chair in stock.

It was interesting comparing the two stores. One called the complimentary stuff you'd use to lash your furniture to you vehicle "Twine" while the other called it "String." One labelled locations in their Self-Serve Furniture warehouse with a number-letter combination (my chair was at 24-D in College Park) but a number-number combination (8-10) in the other. The chair had different inventory numbers at each store. And my pilfered golf pencils were different.

1700 G Street, NW

Yeah, it's not as flashy an address as the one across the street (1600 Pennsylvania Ave), but it is a pretty nice piece of real estate. This sign is on the front door:



The Office of Thrift Supervision "is the primary regulator of all federally chartered and many state-chartered thrift institutions, which include savings banks and savings and loan associations."

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight "promotes housing and a strong economy by ensuring the safety and soundness of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and fostering the vitality of the nation's housing finance system."

Disaster tourism

Head up PA-61 North and just past Ashland (home of the bronze statue of Whistler's Mother), and the road takes an abrupt shift to the right and you are greated by this sign:



If you don't chicken out and turn back, you will come across the remains of Centralia, Pennsylvania, which sits atop a coal mine that has been burning since 1961. The federdal government bought out most of the residents of the town and condemned it several years ago. There are a couple of old homes of people who refused to leave and a modern firehouse in the town (2000 Census population 21), but most everything has been razed. On the corner of what appeared to be the main intersection in downtown Centralia was this lonely park bench:



The sidewalks and side streets are crumbling but they are still around as are a couple of fire hydrants.

More NC income tax craziness

I remedied my missing pages in the tax form problem easily by going to the NC Department of Revenue website and downloading the appropriate PDF.

The form does include the appropriate tax as a piece-wise linear function of taxable income. For taxpayers filing as a single, it's

T ( x )=	0.06 x	If 0<x<12,750.00
	765+0.07(x-12,750.00)	If 12,750.00<=x<60,000.00
	4072.50+0.0775(x-60,000.00)	If 60,000.00<=x<120,000.00
	8722.50+0.0825(x-120,000.00)	If 120,000.00<=x

However, immediately above all this information, is this statement:

"Caution: Use ONLY if your taxable income is $68,000 or more. If less use the North Carolina Tax Table beginning on Page 15."

1. If I should ONLY use the rate schedule if my income is $68,000 or more, why did they include the rate schedule information for income less than that? Two entire brackets are listed but can never be used.
   
   
2. Since the table only steps in $50 increments in taxable income, it is only an approximation to the function, and this is effectively a regressive tax. Suppose Antoine had taxable income of $67949, Bernard had taxable income of $67950, and Clarence had taxable income of $67999, and the filing status of each is single.
   
   1. According to the Tax Table, Clarence owes the same amount of tax ($4691) that Bernard does, despite earning $49 more than Bernard.
      
   2. Bernard owes $2.38 more than he should based on the rate schedule, whereas Clarence owes $1.43 less than he should based on the rate schedule.
      
   3. Antoine owes $4687 according to the table. Compare taxable income minus tax owed for Antoine and Bernard. Despite having earned one dollar more than Antoine in taxable income, Bernard actually has a smaller net income than Antoine. Sure, it's only $2 less, but still is this right?
      
   
   

$0.2505 of my tax dollars down the drain

Last weekend, I did my federal taxes. Although I do tend to procratinate in virtually everything else in my life, I never wait until the last minute for the filing of my income taxes. In fact only once, have I even waited until April to do them. As it turns out, this year, it is a very good thing that I did not wait.

The federal portion went rather smoothly. The only annoying thing was that I had to compute it twice, once using my education expenses as a deduction in 1040A line 19 or as the Lifetime Learning Credit on line 31, attaching Form 8863. Taking the credit ended up saving me $118.62 over taking the deduction, and so it was well worth my time and effort.

However, this weekend, I decided to do my North Carolina state income tax return. I start to fill it out and then notice that the booklet sent to me is missing a few pages. I can fill out the first few lines, but then line 14 directs me to the Tax Table beginning on Page 15. Well, I do have Page 15 and also Page 16, but the information that I need is on Page 17. In fact, I have Pages 1, 2, 23, 24, and then two copies of Pages 9-16, but no Pages 3-8 or 17-22.

At the bottom of Page 24, it says "635,000 copies of this booklet were printed at a cost of $159,068 or approximately $0.2505 each."

It seems to me that simply printing a T(I) tax function that allows you to compute your tax instead of relying on a table look-up would require a lot less paper and smaller printing costs. For example, the federal 1040A Forms and Instruction booklet is 72 pages long, including the cover. Of this, 12 pages (16.7%) are devoted to a list of taxes due based on filing status and which of the 1862 income intervals less than $100,000 ($100,000 or over use Form 1040) you fall into. Due to varying marginal tax rates, this would of course be a piece-wise linear function, but if red stop signs and arrows were used like they are in the 5 pages that it takes to determine whether or not you are elligible for the Earned Income Credit (EIC), they should be able to step even the strongest algebraophobe through it. (How the IRS thinks someone elligible for the EIC will make it through the rest of the form without the arrows, I don't know.) In addition, the 6 page table devoted to determining the value of the EIC also seems to be a needless waste, especially since for 4 pages, they actually bother to print that if you are not filing married jointly and have no children, your credit is $0.

Mathematicians go to the lab

Today in the class that I'm sitting in on, we headed down to the physics lab to try to measure the viscocity of water, corn oil, and liquid soap using a ball-drop viscometer. The basic idea is that you drop a BB in a column of the fluid and time how long it takes to get to the bottom, and from this and knowing the size of the BB and the difference in the densities of the BB and the fluid, you can compute the viscocity.

But we're mathematicians, and so it's been several years since we've been down to a lab of any kind other than the computer lab. For me however, it became less an experiment in fluid dynamics than one in group dynamics, or lack thereof. With 18 people and only 3 equipment set ups, there were 6 people per experiment, a certain recipe for disaster.

If someone had taken charge, delegated responsibilities, then everything could have gone smoothly. If people tried to communicate well, everything could have gone smoothly. Nobody did anything that was unkind or really even anything wrong in terms of lab techniques. People just start doing things in an uncoordinated fashion.

We each knew how to measure the mass of the beads, and so we just started basically trying to work independently but with the same equipment. Wait, why are you taking that off the scale, we going to measure...oh, I see you're going to measure them seperately. We could have just done that at the end and subtract to get the measurement, oh well. Of course I didn't really say much of this at a volume loud enough to change someone's mind.

Even something as simple as having too many people so that I had to sit on the side of the table behind the scale presented a problem. I could not read any measurement of weight. I didn't really complain, but this did kind of make me feel less a part of the group. What am I saying, there was no group.

For some reason, immediately after two other students and I carefully measured the volume of corn oil in the cyllinder and discussed our measurements to get a consensus, one of them poured out the oil for a reason that I don't understand. I think it was because we didn't have a measurement of the weight of the empty cyllinder, which we need to compute the density of the oil. Of course now our measure of the volume is completely useless. Actually it was pointless even before that because this cyllinder full of oil came from another group that was finished with it, and per the instructions of the guy running the lab, we were to just use their measurements of the density of the oil. I tried to tell this to the other students but they didn't listen. We eventually did use the other group's density measurement. Oh, these other two students when they talked to each only spoke in Chinese, which is not understood by the other four people in the group.

Then there were the two people in the group trying to do all the computations from the water experiment. Naturally no one brought a calculator down to the lab with us, and so one of them had to run upstairs and get one. But once that was solved, it became painfully obvious that one of my colleagues has only a very vague notion of how the metric system works. She's a better mathematician and fluid dynamicist than I am in many ways, but yet she didn't really know what the prefixes centi- and milli- meant. How is this possible?

For my part, I sort of just sat back and observed. I did end up releasing a couple of BBs at the end so that two other people could time them, and I provided the conversion from volume measure in liters to volume measured in cubic centimeters, but for me, the experiment truly did morph into watching six mathematicians try to drop BBs into a column of water, and wondering how much more smoothly things would have gone if there were only say two of us working together.

9cm

I know this is in Danish, but down at the bottom, there's an illustration that should make some sense (At least I can get some understanding from it although whether my understanding is correct is another matter.), provided you know Europeans like to use a decimal comma instead of a decimal point (their 17,5 is our 17.5). Some Danish scientists have found that the 2002 finding that Yding Skov was the highest point in Denmark is incorrect. Actually Møllehøj is 9cm taller. That's 3.5 inches.

More FCC complaints

Here's some data on how many indecency complaints have been filed with the FCC over the last five years.

Year	# of complaints filed	# of programs complained about	NALs issued*
2000	111	111	7
2001	346	152	7
2002	13,922	389	7
2003	202,032	375	3
2004	1,068,802	314	12

*--NAL=Notice of Apparent Liability, i.e. a finding that something was indecent. Of the 12 issued in 2004, only one was for something that aired in 2004 (Nipplegate), one was for a 2003 TV show (FOX's Married by America) and the remaining ten were for morning drive-time radio ranging from 2001 to 2003. Click for Source. The programs complained about were heavily weighted toward radio, but radio complaints haven't really increased with the dramatic jump in TV complaints.

So, it appears that the number of programs complained about has decreased; however the number of people offended is on the rise dramatically. I decided to let Excel use its GROWTH() function to see how many complaints will be lodged in 2005, and it tell me that 17,081,713 will complain about a program this year. (In 2006, more than 2 out of every 3 Americans will complain to the FCC.) If the number of programs stays around 300, and we assume each program receives the same number of complaints, then around 57,000 people per episode. That would mean roughly 1 out of every 200 people who watch CSI will complain about it to the federal government. (In 2006, that will jump to 1 out of 14.) But are these people actually watching it?

If you watch something, and you find it offensive, are you likely to watch it again? Apparently so. Or, the complaints come from people who don't watch the show. Should the FCC adopt a rule requiring you to actually have seen the show in order to lodge a complaint about it? The FCC should set up a website for people to anticomplain. That is, they should allow people to file a statement saying, "Thursday night's episode of CSI was not indecent. Bad TV, perhaps, but not indecent."